Laurence Sterne is the most dedicated writer of nervous fictions in the eighteenth century. His novels delight in describing the minute machinations of the nervous system. A battalion of animal spirits rushing across cerebral folds, a pineal gland possessing the image of a lover’s nose, a brain fixated upon a mental misassociation, nerves singing with sympathy at another’s touch: these are the subjects of Sterne’s writing. The nervous system obsesses him as much as—and perhaps even more than—the persons it composes. Sterne himself catalogs the dispositions, motives, and shocks of the nervous system with as much exacting detail as he does Walter’s disquisitions on names and noses, Toby’s traumatized retellings of the trenches and battlements of Namur, and Yorick’s minute recountings of fleeting touches, glances, and grimaces. The characters of Tristram Shandy are determined by the nature of their nerves: Walter’s hobbyhorsical preoccupations are the result of ideas that have grown like yeast in his brain; Toby hesitates at Widow Wadman’s door because his animal spirits are inherently modest; Tristram traces all his problems to “the different tracks and trains” carved into his cerebrum at birth; and Yorick, in his guise as the sentimental traveler of Sterne’s second novel, struggles as much with the generosity elicited by others as he does with the sympathetic vibrations humming away in his own sensorium. These novels are so detailed in their renderings of nervous fibers and flesh that their only serious rivals in this regard are the anatomical works of the period that Sterne draws from and mocks.
But Sterne interests me in this chapter not simply because he views the nervous system and its relation to various mental faculties and affections with a novelist’s eye, one capable of representing animal spirits or vibrating nerves as if they were characters possessed by purposes and emotions all their own. His novels also grapple with a question in the history of science, and in doing so, they demonstrate how literary form can explore a matter that would seem to belong solely to natural philosophy or its historians. The problem in question has to do with scientific theory change. Sterne’s major publishing career, seen in its sweep from the first volumes of Tristram Shandy, which appeared in 1759, to the publication of A Sentimental Journey in 1768, indexes one of the great ruptures or advancements (depending on one’s point of view) in the history of neuroscience: the transition from a “mechanistic” understanding of the brain to a “vitalist” conception of the nervous system.1 As we have seen, the mechanistic paradigm imagines the body as a kind of machine populated by billiard-ball-like animal spirits knocking about according to the readily intelligible laws of cause and effect. Its vitalist rival, however, finds in the flesh more dynamic forces and agencies—energies impossible to capture in the net of simple mechanical laws. Sterne was evidently aware of this shift, since his novels allegorize it.2 The first few volumes of Tristram Shandy concern the activities of the animal spirits, and as a result much of that novel tracks the travails of those spirits in the body’s internal microcosm. But nearly ten years after these initial volumes, especially with the appearance of A Sentimental Journey, the animal spirits are almost absent from Sterne’s writing.3 They have been replaced by nerves that vibrate or pulse, particularly in the presence of another person or beloved object. In this respect, along with the nature of the nerves, something else changes in Sterne’s writing: he begins to focus more on the interactions between distinct sensoria rather than obsessing over the actions happening within a single cranium.4 Hence, Sterne’s interest in the nerves and brain never wavers throughout his writing career. What does shift, however, is the very nature of the nervous system, the components that make it work, the energies that flow through it, and the sort of minds to which it gives rise.
Why did the nervous system change in the mid-eighteenth century?5 As John Sutton notes, this question is still something of a mystery: it’s not clear, for example, why the animal spirits, so frequently attacked throughout the period as pure fantasy, continued to thrive well into the eighteenth century; nor is it clear why vibrating nerves suddenly appeared as an attractive replacement at about the midpoint of the century.6 Sterne casts some light on this puzzle by emphasizing how much early neuroscience was wrapped up in figurative language. Like Swift before him, Sterne, in his early writings especially, is one the canniest critics of the metaphors driving animal-spirits physiology. And like many others, he shows how the animal spirits result from personifications. But he also makes a point of explicating why such personifications would prove seductive in the first place. If the brain is not simply opaque matter but a microcosm where our more evident actions are matched by smaller minds, then anyone seeking to explore the mind’s interior—a neuroscientist, surely, but also a novelist—would naturally rely on these figures. Animal spirits survive, then, as representational devices: figures that seem to make a plunge into the physical depths of the psyche possible.
Sterne wasn’t alone in such analyses. Many of the same vitalist natural philosophers who were working hard to establish a new view of the nerves were often careful readers of nervous figures like the animal spirits. In this respect, it wasn’t only microscopes that did away with the animal spirits—it was also linguistic analysis. This may make it seem as if vitalist neuroscience, having stripped away the rusting metaphors of previous mechanistic systems, had finally offered a fresh and plain view of the brain, one free of the figures that had sustained earlier attempts to explicate the machinery of the nervous system. But Sterne’s representation of vitalism tells a different story. In his novels, vitalism generates still more baroque figures and fictions. Sterne shows how the new neuroscientific paradigm blooming in his midst often intensified the figurative dynamics of the past century’s work on the brain. Not only did it continue to personify parts of the brain; it also likened people to the parts of a giant nervous system—what A Sentimental Journey calls “the great Sensorium of the World.”7 Sterne’s reading of these figures is complex. While he certainly mocks their excesses, he also sees in them the seeds of something new: namely, an attempt to reorient how we study mind and brain. By turning our attention away from the mechanisms at work in a single subject in order to consider the energies joining together self and world, vitalist neuroscience and its figures make thought and feeling social—a position with which Sterne seems to have agreed in part. Like Cavendish before him, then, Sterne’s satire of nervous figures and fictions should not be taken as an implicit plea for plain accounts of the nerves and brain. On the other side of his satire is a real sympathy for such figures and what they might accomplish: a fundamental refiguring of the nerves and mind.
Since the animal spirits must appear at first glance as exactly the sort of learned but ultimately trivial reference that Sterne’s novels delight in—and not, as I have claimed, the key to understanding his earliest representations of mind and body—it is worth stressing their importance and prominence in his writing. Depending on how one scans Tristram Shandy’s complex syntax and punctuation, the animal spirits make their first appearance in that work’s second sentence. Tristram, in the midst of lamenting his parents’ distracted state of mind at the moment of his conception, suddenly breaks off his account—with an aposiopetic dash—to tell us of the animal spirits: “I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing . . .—Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;—you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits.”8 In order of narrative preeminence, then, the spirits are second only to Walter and Elizabeth Shandy. Before Tristram himself is properly introduced, much less conceived, before Toby or Yorick or Trim or any of the other major characters in the novel make an appearance, we learn of the animal spirits. And for good reason. Upon introducing the spirits, Tristram immediately launches into a lecture explaining their importance. In an allusion to Locke’s chapter on the association of ideas, and Addison’s rewriting of it, Tristram notes that the animal spirits carve patterns into cerebral matter, thereby locking the mind into particular associative habits.9 No matter how free or expatiating a train of thought may seem to its subject, the course of thinking is guided in advance by such paths. The above-cited passage continues like so:
Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into; so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a halfpenny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself shall not be able to drive them off it. (TS 1–2)
And following this first introduction, the animal spirits soon reappear, just a few paragraphs later, charged with a new task. Tristram, now drawing on eighteenth-century theories of reproduction and generation, maintains that it is the “business” of the animal spirits “to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS,” the little version of the future self supposedly folded into the sperm cell (TS 2).10 In addition to determining our ideational life, then, the spirits also influence our prenatal development, serving as our earliest companions and guardians.
The sudden introduction of the animal spirits—and the resulting lecture on their origin and purpose—establishes what will become the abiding formal pattern of the earliest volumes of Tristram Shandy: the main narrative concerning Tristram’s birth and childhood, always barely begun, is disrupted by a digression, one often concerning a particularly abstruse philosophical or scientific topic.11 In this instance, just as the story of Walter, Elizabeth, and their struggles gets off, Tristram breaks in with what might seem like a distraction from the main thrust of the narrative—a distraction that demonstrates Tristram’s natural philosophical knowledge even as it detracts from what we take to be the overarching story. But as the reader eventually discovers, and as Tristram himself tirelessly repeats, such digressions are central to the novel. While the references to animal spirits may appear for a moment as an indulgence in “learned wit”—that is, as an effort to mock the sort of medical or philosophical pedantry that skews a presumably more direct account of life, psychology, and history—they also become, in time, a principal concern of the narrative.12 Rather than withering away as an inconsequential departure from the novel’s main action, the animal spirits grow into important characters in their own right. They are every bit as purposeful (perhaps even more so) as their properly human counterparts. More importantly still, they often determine psychological states and actuate significant events in the story. Yorick’s breezy follies are attributed, in part, to the “brisk gale of his spirits” (TS 28); Walter’s philosophical speculations are generated by spirits “investigating . . . tracts” in his brain (TS 226); and Toby’s dramatic pause before Widow Wadman’s door is thanks to “his modest spirits” attempting to flee from him (TS 768). Tempting as it may be to confine talk of the animal spirits to Tristram Shandy’s satirical assault on specialized intellectual knowledge—an aspect of that work sometimes taken to be at odds with its interest in character and narrative—the spirits demonstrate just how quickly the “satirical” and the “novelistic,” the learned and the lived, opinions and life merge in Sterne’s writing.
But the spirits’ greatest influence, as the novel’s opening pages make clear, is on Tristram himself. The central concern of the first few chapters of Sterne’s novel—that Walter’s skewed animal spirits will distort the body and hence the mind of his son—is borne out by the remainder of the story.13 Both Walter and Tristram remark on this event throughout the novel, with both lamenting the quality of animal spirits father has passed on to son.14 It is implied that Walter’s untimely interruption, and the resulting dissemination of the animal spirits, has condemned Tristram to a life of chronological carelessness, a fact evident in the form of the story itself. Tristram’s tendency to leap backward and forward in time, to digress and to defer from his main narrative, to launch into painfully minute accounts of inconsequential events, and to introduce gaps into his narrative just before the resolution of some climactic event—all of this can be attributed to the “road” carved into his cerebral matter by animal spirits “cluttering like hey-go-mad” (TS 1–2). Or so Tristram himself claims when, at the height of a chronologically complex sequence in his story, he exclaims: “—and now, you see, I am lost myself!—But ’tis my father’s fault; and whenever my brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cambric, running along the whole length of the web” (TS 558). It would seem that the tracks inscribed in Tristram’s psyche at his conception transformed into a more palpable form later in life. The uneven thread wending its way through the brain—a product in effect of Walter’s “scattered and dispersed” animal spirits—parallels the distracted story meandering through the pages of the novel (TS 2). Time is out of joint in Tristram’s telling because the brain of the teller has been similarly wrenched.15
Since the movements of the animal spirits so greatly impact and influence the persons populating Tristram Shandy’s world, then, they deserve their status as important characters in their own right. In fact, the animal spirits frequently behave as tiny reflections of the larger self. This tendency (ultimately parodic and mocking, I’ll argue) to personify the animal spirits—to treat properly senseless brain matter as if it possessed thought, emotion, and purpose—will be evident throughout Sterne’s novel, though again even in the narrative’s earliest moments we catch a glimpse of it at its starkest. When Tristram reveals that the animal spirits don’t simply carve smooth tracks into brain matter—a process easily accounted for by the fully material, utterly mindless activities of erosion and friction—but that they are also tasked with the “business” of having “escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception,” the novel subtly transforms mere matter into something more (TS 2). The animal spirits become creatures with purpose (they have “business” and are not simply pushed along by external force) and even the capacity for empathy and emotion (the language of escorting “hand-in-hand” and “safe” passage recalls a caring adult leading along an apprehensive child). Indeed, in this instance, the animal spirits are not simply generic persons but particular caretakers. Just as the homunculus is a tiny reflection of Tristram, the animal spirits (homunculi themselves) mirror Tristram’s parents: guardians who, at least in principle, are supposed to lead their child safely down the road of life.
As we have come to expect, personifying brain matter gives rise to a version of Ryle’s “double life legend”: the external actions of the whole person are paralleled, and perhaps explained, by events transpiring in an obscured internal realm. In this respect, personifying the animal spirits not only adds a new cast of characters to the novel; it also transforms its form. Because the spirits consistently appear as persons in their own right, with their own purposes and particularities, the novel’s attention is split, as a result, between two scenes or spaces. The world of properly human persons and their struggles (e.g., Tristram, Walter, and Elizabeth) sits side by side with, and is depicted with the same novelistic tools as, the world of the brain and the animal spirits. Although it is not the only novel of the time pulling such tricks, Tristram Shandy is, for reasons that will become clear momentarily, one of the most extravagant in its insistence on exploring and juxtaposing these two “interiors”: the psyches of its characters and the cerebral folds of their brains. Throughout its pages, we have the sense, at any given moment, that two dramas are unfolding in tandem, that two sets of characters (the humans and their animal spirits) are acting out the same scenes in contiguous, though not fully communicative, spaces and that only the power of the novelist-narrator (posing as a neuroscientist of sorts) can see both scenes and draw connections between them.16
Moreover, Tristram Shandy often registers a subtle power imbalance in the double life of a person and his brain. While sometimes the animal spirits march in step with the whole organism, at other moments they can appear more willful and intelligent than their properly human counterpart. In a chiasmic switch, the novel makes the spirits free and active (more like humans) only to cast the person as passive and mechanical (more like an insentient particle). We witness this interplay when a hot chestnut falls into Phutatorius’s lap, a scene the novel narrates from two angles. Within the body, “ten batallions of animal spirits, all tumultuously crouded down, through different defiles and circuits, to the place in danger” (TS 382). But despite the “best intelligence” of “these messengers,” “Phutatorius was not able to dive into the secret of what was going forwards below” (TS 382). And when the novel shifts from “below” to “above,” from animal spirits within the nervous system to the character’s psyche, we find Phutatorius, undecided on his own sensations, attempting to maintain a “stoick” countenance—until the heat causes him to exclaim “Zounds!”17 In this scene, the inner parts of the body act, while Phutatorius himself remains strangely static. In animal-spirit physiology, the whole human mind can become a mindless mechanism, driven only by particulate intelligences at work within.
Thanks to the animal spirits, then, characters are cut off from themselves: their lives determined by the course of particles navigating the nervous system. Even more significantly, characters are cut off from one another. Since thought and action are pushed along by internal homunculi—rather than by self or other—the animal-spirits paradigm means that every person is a walled-off microcosm standing apart from every other. At least since John Traugott’s important work, Sterne’s critics have noted that one key concern (and comic mechanism) of Tristram Shandy is the isolation of its characters.18 Toby obsesses over military fortifications; Walter worries over natural philosophers; everyone rides his own hobbyhorse. To be sure, the external environment and other people can change a character’s mind—but only indirectly. Walter Shandy, the novel’s most sustained stand-in for the neuroscientist, knows that minds are determined by the nature of their nerves, and so to change a person one must first change his or her brain. Walter’s attempts to guide his son’s life, for example, often become efforts to shape his nervous system. His obsession with the details of Tristram’s delivery results from an endeavor to preserve the “the finer net-work and texture” of the cerebellum, the seat of “wit, memory, fancy, eloquence” in Walter’s reasoning (TS 174–75).19 Likewise, as a reader of Slawkenbergius’s Tale, he knows that a bigger nose allows more room for the animal spirits inhabiting that organ to be invigorated by “the warmth and force of the imagination,” thereby giving rise to an “excellency of fancy” (TS 275). But Tristram himself is very much his father’s son in this respect. He maintains, for example, that before books can reach the understanding, they must first make their way through the nervous system. A love story he read as a youth has remained in “the right side of the cullender” of his own brain ever since (TS 628). Ideally, Tristram explains, his own book will print itself directly upon the cerebrums of his audience by “convey[ing] but the same impressions to every other brain, which the occurrences themselves excite in my own” (TS 400).
We also have the sense that Sterne is mocking these formal devices and the scientific view of the nervous system that supports them. Sterne’s mockery becomes clearer, to be sure, as the novel progresses, but we get our first hint of it even in its opening pages, which enact a one-sided debate between Tristram and an imagined male reader. Tristram argues passionately for a scientific view of the mind and its nervous system that would afford us access to the otherwise invisible fluids, forces, and particles navigating beneath our skin. The implied reader—only ever evident in Tristram’s responses or in his subtle ventriloquizing of the reader’s questions—appears more than a little skeptical of Tristram’s views.20 For instance, Tristram must explain to him the harm in Mrs. Shandy’s query about the clock, since, to this reader, “there is nothing in the question . . . either good or bad” (TS 2). It simply never occurs to Tristram’s audience that a conversation between two people might somehow impact an entire hidden world of animal spirits and homunculi, though Tristram is sure to remind him of this fact: “Then let me tell you, Sir, it was a very unseasonable question at least,—because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits” (TS 2). That Tristram must defend his neuroscience against an incredulous, even hostile, audience becomes clearer still as his “conversation” continues. Here, for example, is Tristram—evidently on the defense now—telling the reader about the nature of the “homunculus,” which travels from sperm to ovum:
The HOMUNCULUS, Sir, in how-ever low and ludicrous a light he may appear, in this age of levity, to the eye of folly or prejudice;—to the eye of reason in scientifick research, he stands confess’d—a BEING guarded and circumscribed with rights:—The minutest philosophers, who, by the bye, have the most enlarged understandings, (their souls being inversely as their enquiries) shew us incontestably, That the HOMUNCULUS is created by the same hand,—engender’d in the same course of nature,—endowed with the same locomotive powers and faculties with us:—That he consists, as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartileges, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours, and articulations;—is a Being of as much activity,—and, in all senses of the word, as much and as truly our fellow-creature as my Lord Chancellor of England. (TS 3)
At this moment, battle lines are drawn. There are those, like Tristram, who see with the “eye of reason in scientifick research” and who are capable, as a result, of discerning within the person still smaller persons. And then there are those, like the implied reader, who view such entities—and, presumably, the scientific research that pretends to behold them—in a light “low and ludicrous.”
Although Tristram himself assures us that such mocking views are the result of “levity,” “folly or prejudice,” the novel, I’ll argue, ultimately sides with the skeptical (TS 2–3). For example, Tristram’s insistence that only the “minutest philosophers” can see the homunculus might be understood as intentional praise or unintentional slight, depending on whether we read “minute” in the literal or figurative sense. Perhaps even more importantly, the passage exposes a reductive fallacy in Tristram’s “scientifick research.” For Tristram, our more evident and public actions can be accounted for by spirits and homunculi operating within our nervous system, since those entities think and feel just as we do. But then how do we account for, say, the “terror” the homunculus must feel if the animal spirits abandon him on his journey? (TS 3). To explain such emotions, Tristram simply peeks into the homunculus’s own nervous system, since, that being possesses not only legal rights but also “nerves” and “brains” of its own. And sure enough, he imagines that the “animal spirits” of the poor, abandoned homunculus must be “ruffled beyond description” (TS 3). In other words, when Tristram must explain a person’s actions and characteristics, he considers the parts that compose their nervous system and body; when he must explain the actions and characteristics of those composing parts, he considers the still smaller elements composing a still smaller nervous system. The passage stages the eighteenth century’s own version of the “homunculus fallacy.” In Tristram Shandy, it’s animal spirits all the way down.21
The subtle interplay between Tristram and his skeptical audience is important not only because it helps us perceive the outlines of the novel’s attack on neuroscience. Just as significantly, such dialogues index a real controversy unfolding at the time. I will have more to stay about the immediate neuroscientific context of Sterne’s novel in a moment. For now, it’s worth emphasizing that, when the first volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759, the animal spirits—and the neuroscience that set out to track them—were in an odd state. In one of the few essays to focus on Tristram Shandy’s continual references to the animal spirits, Valerie Myer explains that the term alludes mainly to older physiological systems (she mentions the work of Burton, Rabelais, and Donne), “which the medical profession of [Sterne’s] day was busily discarding under the impact of experimental science.”22 Myer argues essentially that Sterne is playing with a natural philosophical concept that the serious science of his time had left for dead.23 Myer is correct up to a point, but we need to add a few important details to her account. It is certainly true that, while the animal spirits had persisted for millennia, they appeared on the verge of extinction by the mid-eighteenth century, thanks both to unceasing attacks on their very existence and to new conceptions of the nerves and brain. Somehow, though, the animal spirits remained a live concern for a host of natural philosophers writing contemporaneously with Sterne. In other words, the dialogue Sterne stages at the beginning of Tristram Shandy—wherein Tristram must uphold a supposedly scientific vision of the personified nervous system in the face of unbelieving huffs—is not entirely invented. One could witness similar debates unfolding in the pages of more serious physiological texts of the time.
In just a few paragraphs, then, Tristram Shandy telegraphs some of its most significant and abiding concerns: the relationship between mind and brain, the power of figurative language, the closeness of novelistic and neuroscientific representations of interiority, and the history of science. The novel presents the animal spirits—purposefully personified bits of nervous flesh, operating in a world hidden just beneath the skin and at times determining the actual person—as important characters in their own right. By treating them this way, Tristram Shandy makes an important claim about the human mind—namely, that it is split between two scenes or spaces, the mental and the material—and, consequently, the novel enacts a formal strategy for describing and understanding the psyche: the juxtaposition of mental acts and nervous mechanism. In nearly the same breath, though, the very existence of the animal spirits, and the sort of representations and physiological explanations they allow, are acknowledged as controversial and perhaps even outmoded. More simply, Sterne’s depiction of the nervous system does not take place in a vacuum. Tristram Shandy knowingly, though obliquely at this point, concerns itself with the history of the brain and with the debates and disputes embroiling that organ in the mid-eighteenth century. With that in mind, I want to turn to the more immediate neuroscientific context of the novel. What will soon become clear, and what clearly interested Sterne himself, is just how much the neuroscientific debates happening amid the publication of Sterne’s novel concern not simply scientific questions but literary and figurative ones.
I’ve already detailed the importance of animal spirits for the grand neurophysiological systems of the late seventeenth century. We’ve seen how thinkers like Willis made them the centerpiece of his far-reaching account of mind and brain and how these same spirits often served as the prime focus for critics of such systems. For these critics, the spirits were not, as Willis and others continually claimed, the otherwise hidden matter that, once uncovered and understood, would make it possible to explain the psyche by means of the brain. On the contrary, the spirits seemed to be the stuff of fantasy; they were creatures wrought by figurative language. I now want to catch up on the fate of the animal spirits by filling in the gap separating those early attacks (most of which took place in the immediate aftermath of Willis’s work in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) from the first volumes of Tristram Shandy. What we will notice right away, in the course of completing this history, is that the critiques we saw in the work of Willis’s rivals—the sense, in particular, that the animal spirits were the stuff of fantasy and metaphor—never abated. If anything, such linguistic attacks became more general and wide-ranging. As in Sterne’s novel, in many eighteenth-century scientific texts examining the animal spirits meant investigating the metaphors that created and sustained them.
For instance, throughout the 1720s and 1730s, a group of physicians, joined by their admiration of Newton’s theories of nervous energy, launched a series of incisive critiques of animal-spirit physiology.24 As we might expect, some of their attacks concerned empirical matters. Continually, we find eighteenth-century natural philosophers condemning an older generation of animal spirit advocates for promoting theories without empirical proof. Particularly important in this respect were a number of experiments, made during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, that began to establish, irrefutably, that the nerves were more like solid ropes than hollow tubes and hence that a fluid medium (like the animal spirits) could not pass through them.25 Writing in 1738, Bryan Robinson questioned the “received Opinion, that the Nerves are small Pipes which contain a Fluid, called Animal Spirits.”26 As Robinson notes, “It does not appear from any Experiments, that the Nerves are Pipes; or that such a Fluid as they conceive Animal Spirits to be, is separated from the Blood in the Brain. . . . The Nerves are not only impervious to the smallest Stylus, but when viewed with a Microscope, evidently appear to have no Cavity.”27 But in addition to exposing the animal spirits as entities without empirical grounding, the early eighteenth-century critics of the animal spirits also sought to expose the fantasies that made the spirits seem sensible in the first place. George Cheyne, for example, argued that the animal spirits were not simply personifications but rather the result of a still more primary, originating metaphor: the likening of the human body to a machine. Faced with the “most difficult Problem in all the Animael Oeconomy”—how to “give any tolerable Account” of how muscles are moved in moments of purposeful action—early physicians, Cheyne explained, compared the body to a “Machin put into Action and Motion by the Force of Water convey’d in Pipes.”28 With this similitude established, everything else clicks into place: since hydraulic machines must have some forceful fluid flowing through their “pipes,” it follows that the machine-body must have a corresponding fluid in its “veins.” As Cheyne notes, “It was easy, from this Resemblance, to forge a thin, imperceptible Fluid, passing and re-passing through the Nerves. . . . On such a slender and imaginary Similitude, the precarious Hypothesis of Animal Spirits seems to be built.”29 In Cheyne’s estimation, animal spirits exist only as elements in an elaborate metaphor. And as metaphors, the animal spirits make it appear we can comprehend something (volition) that we do not properly grasp.
While Cheyne claims that the body-as-machine metaphor ultimately generates the animal spirits, the physician David Kinneir, in an extraordinary work, A New Essay on the Nerves, examines the spirits themselves as wholly figurative inventions. The opening pages of his text present one of the most sophisticated linguistic analyses of the animal spirits after Swift and before Sterne. Having established that animal spirits must be something like physical particles at work in the body, Kinneir remains vexed by his contemporaries’ tendency to attribute feeling or thought to these otherwise mindless entities: “Salt and Phlegm, being mixed, will make up a spirit. This I can easily grant to subsist in Animal bodies; and it is in truth the only Animal Spirit: But to endow this Spirit with a faculty peculiar to the soul, is going beyond all reason. Yet how often do we hear it said, when an Hypochondriack is complaining of the severest pains and universal uneasiness, that his Animal Spirits are out of order; a sort of cant of no meaning nor use.”30 Kinneir seeks to make sense out of this “cant of no meaning nor use.” When someone reports that his or her animal spirits are “out of order,” what should we take that person to be saying? For Kinneir, when people talk of their “good” or “bad” spirits, they are not denominating literal entities navigating the nervous system. Rather, such statements represent an effort to describe the abstract and complicated state of the whole organism—body and mind:
The Animal Spirits are said to be good, when a person is lively, chearful, and capable of all Animal actions, in such a perfection as our nature will allow. But this is saying no more, than that such a one enjoys a good state of health, whence ariseth that lively disposition. . . . What is therefore meant by Animal Spirits, is not so much a production of the Animal substances, as the pure effect or result of a Mens sana in corpore sano [“a healthy mind in a heathy body”]. For there is such a reciprocal connexion and union betwixt soul and body, that the operations of the one and the other are variously determined, as either of them is affected.31
In this passage, Kinneir dissolves at least a century’s worth of sedimented nervous figures. According to Kinneir, when I say that my spirits are good, I am speaking in metaphor. More properly, I am saying: my body and mind are working well together (e.g., I’ve eaten enough food, so I feel “lively” and not cranky or anxious). But since these more literal statements are especially abstract, complex, and approximate, we tend to condense them into quicker, livelier, and more concrete figures. And so when I want to convey my healthy disposition, I transfer a quality that strictly belongs to my whole person—understood as an amalgamation of mental and physical properties—to my body parts. In doing so, I am making those body parts, the animal spirits, the bearer, and sometimes even the cause, of my state of mind. In short, the animal spirits reify a more playfully ambiguous state.
Like all idiomatic expressions, referencing one’s “good spirits,” and thereby attributing mind and feeling to the parts of one’s brain rather than to one’s whole self, must appear innocent enough. But Kinneir sounds a note of caution. As we have seen, his translation of the term back into a statement about the wide-ranging interactions of mind and body is unusual. More commonly, such metaphors become literalized in a different way. Physiologists tend to treat this trope with too much seriousness, as they find themselves hunting for actual “chearful” animal spirits within the nervous system. In doing so, they make it seem as if the nature of the organism’s liveliness or cheerfulness requires some deeper explanation, one available only to the anatomist who can probe into an internal cerebral realm abounding in the mechanisms making body and mind work. This is what worries Kinneir. When his fellow physicians speak of animal spirits—as material elements with mental states—they appear to have uncovered the source of thought, feeling, and action, when in fact they have misunderstood a metaphor and thereby generated an illusory interior. For Kinneir, references to one’s “good Animal Spirits” are really references to “the just harmony between soul and body, as in a healthy state . . . but how that comes about is, and probably will always be, a mystery to human reason.”32 For Kinneir, a dualist and a skeptic of a sort, we cannot know how mind and matter interact. But even if we grant that this interaction is simply complex rather than forever mysterious, his point stands. The animal spirits create the sense that there are a few simplistic elements, which we can name, know, and control, at the root of our complex mental states.
With Kinneir’s critique in mind, we can tie together the various objections to the animal spirits in the early to mid-eighteenth century. One attack on their very nature was empirical: no one had seen a single animal spirit or even the honeycombed pores that allowed their travel through the nerves. Another, more searching attack, though, was linguistic. When misrecognized as literal entities rather than elaborate metaphors, animal spirits tend to provide a sense of power and knowledge in the face of complex bodily and mental phenomena. The ultimate nature of the nerves is unknown, so the animal spirit physiologist makes them into familiar hollow tubes. The process of volition is uncertain, so the body is likened to a machine, with the animal spirits serving as hydraulic fuel. It’s unclear how the interactions of body and mind produce certain thoughts or feelings, so the animal spirits become a way of pinning a cause to such things. In each of these cases, the neuroscientist promises knowledge of the psyche so long as we are willing to look past the dynamics of the whole organism to a more inward realm, where smaller, simpler versions of the self navigate the nervous system. Hence, Thomas Morgan sums up the use of animal spirits in medical discourse of the time like so: “The animal Spirits have been introduc’d and discours’d of as intelligent free Agents, and there is nothing that has been thought difficult to account for in the whole Animal Oeconomy, but what has been attributed to the miraculous Power and Operations of these Spirits: . . . In a word, the Spirits are call’d up upon all occasions, and employ’d about every thing but what they are capable of effecting; while the obvious sensible Qualitys of the nervous Fluid, and the Purposes to which it serves in the animated Body, have been altogether overlook’d or misunderstood.”33 Expose the animal spirits as the product of fancy, or as a particularly baroque metaphor, and suddenly the enterprise of neuroscience appears altogether more unreliable.
Still, a word of caution is in order. It would be a mistake to attribute a thoroughgoing skepticism of neuroscience to the physiologists I’ve surveyed above. Their attacks on the animal spirits, though they strike at the foundations of earlier physiological systems, seek to clear the ground for new ways of imagining the psyche, not salt it entirely. For example, in addition to critiquing the animal spirits on empirical and linguistic grounds, many of these writes also provided a real alternative to the mechanistic view of the nervous system, one drawn from Newton’s hints concerning the vibratory “aether” suffusing the body. I’ll have more to say about this alternative and some of its own nuances in a moment, but for now we can gather the main points of this new system from Cheyne’s celebrated description of the brain as a kind of musical organ: “May not the sentient Principle have its Seat in some Place in the Brain, where the Nerves terminate, like the Musician shut up in his Organ-Room? May not the infinite Windings, Convolutions, and Complications of the Beginning of the Nerves which constitute the Brain, serve to determin their particular Tone, Tension, and consequently the Intestin Vibrations of their Parts? . . . May not these Vibrations be propagated through their Lengths by a subtile, spirituous, and infinitely elastick Fluid, which is the Medium of the Intelligent Principle?”34 At first glance, Cheyne’s new account of the nerves may not seem so different from the old one. We will note that the mind still sits in a Cartesian theater, a place where it can “play” the nerves like a musician plays an instrument. However, by describing the nerves as vibrating strings rather than hollow canals, Cheyne’s image leaves little room for the animal spirits—or for the personifications that sustain them.
Given the sustained and serious attacks on animal-spirits physiology and the introduction of a plausible alternative, we might expect that by the mid-eighteenth century any serious reader of natural philosophy would have abandoned the spirits as entirely outmoded bits of scientific whimsy, now disproven and mercifully left behind. And yet even a quick glance at the neuroscientific writing during this period reveals a more complicated picture: one wherein a kind of generalized uncertainty about how to understand the mechanisms of the nervous system reigns. Although the 1740s and 1750s saw the first serious efforts to create systems around the vibrating nerves—in the work of Hartley and Whytt—they also witnessed a major pushback by the advocates of the animal spirits. Much of this pushback was thanks to followers of the influential anatomist Herman Boerhaave, whose student Albrecht von Haller made a particularly powerful case for the continual relevance of animal-spirit physiology.35 These works not only reiterated and reinforced the explanatory power of the animal spirits; they also attacked advocates of vibratory nerves with their own weapons. Malcolm Flemyng’s 1751 The Nature of Nervous Fluid indicates the tenor of the time. Flemyng begins by flatly stating that the “Nerves are hollow canals or tubes . . . which contain and transmit a peculiar juice or fluid.”36 But Flemyng’s work is not an unknowing return to an earlier age. Instead, he acknowledges the new prevalence of vibratory theories: “There may be in animal fluids in general, and that of the nerves in particular, some subtle aether, fire or spirit . . . diffused through the atmosphere, and perhaps over our whole system, acting by laws unknown to us.”37 But he then sets out to overturn these new vibratory theories with empirical evidence of his own: “A nerve compressed between the fingers, or tied round with a thread, immediately ceases to act; as soon as the compression or ligature is taken off, sense or motion returns; which evidently shews, that no aether or universal spirit is sufficient to excite the functions depending upon a nerve.”38 In other words, just as the animal spirits were attacked for being empirically baseless, the vibrating nerves appeared poised to suffer a similar fate.
The transition from one neuroscientific paradigm to the next, then, is neither clean nor clear. That is, the precise moment when animal spirits give way to vibrating nerves is impossible to pinpoint, just as the exact arguments or evidence, which ultimately establish the new conception of the nervous system, remain obscure. One reason for this uncertainty may be that, in the case of neuroscience, natural philosophy cannot proceed as it is supposed to: by using empirical discoveries to knock down old theories in order to establish new, more accurate ones in their place. As we have seen, one can adduce empirical evidence both for and against the animal spirits, and one can present findings supporting or refuting the vibrating nerves. But if the animal spirits stick around in a spectral state, despite all empirical evidence weighing against them, it also may be because, as Kinneir notes, they are misinterpreted metaphors, idioms taken for scientific facts that seem to explain the workings of the psyche. In this respect, the animal spirits are more representational devices than real neuroscientific entities, and hence they must be analyzed with a different set of tools. A microscope may never finally expose the spirits as a fantasy, but a linguistic analysis of their use in writings of the period may produce a different result. And this is precisely what happens in Sterne’s fiction.
We know the animal spirits are still prominent in a few novels of the mid-eighteenth century. As we have seen, Eliza Haywood, in her important, decade-spanning career, uses the animal spirits in her novels. But closer to Sterne, both in time and sensibility, we find the Fieldings (Sarah and Henry) making use of the spirits throughout their work.39 Although Henry Fielding is generally seen as less interested in interiority (of all sorts) than his close contemporaries, he nevertheless uses the animal spirits throughout Tom Jones to explore the confines of his characters’ minds and to trace their more evident actions to hidden neural mechanisms. Not only is Tom’s personality sometimes attributed to his animal spirits—“Jones had naturally violent animal Spirits”40—there are also moments in Fielding, as in other writing of the period, where the animal spirits behave like little rival minds that operate willfully and must be managed accordingly: “When Jones had taken Leave of his Friend the Lieutenant, he endeavored to close his Eyes, but all in vain; his Spirits were too lively and wakeful to be lulled to Sleep. So having amused, or rather tormented himself with the Thoughts of his Sophia, till it was open Daylight, he called for some Tea.”41
We might assume that Fielding is using the animal spirits here in precisely the way that Kinneir recommends: as a metaphor that captures a complex state of mind. In this respect, his spirits seem innocent enough. But Sarah Fielding, whose major novels appeared nearly contemporaneously with the first volumes of Tristram Shandy, employs these entities in more complex ways. Consider, for instance, a seemingly uneventful—but, for our purposes, telling—passage from her History of the Countess of Dellwyn: “When Lady Dellwyn finished the new furnishing [of] her Castle, she began to be at a great Loss for Employment; she had now no Refuge from a languid, wearisome Melancholy, which is often called a Fever upon the Spirits; she had no Food from outward Objects, to employ her animal Spirits, and they therefore prey’d at home, and oppressed her own Mind.”42 The first two clauses of Fielding’s sentence explain that Lady Dellwyn, no longer diverted by the outward trappings of her home, has become unsettled. The third clause tells the same story but makes the animal spirits the key characters in the account: in this case, the spirits, left undistracted by external stimuli, have become disturbed. The subtle shift in focalization here—from a free indirect view of Lady Dellwyn’s mind to a third-person view of her brain—only seems innocuous because a figurative sleight of hand has smoothed out these otherwise incongruous perspectives. By personifying the animal spirits, by investing them with the same desires and disappointments as Lady Dellwyn herself, Fielding can make it seem as if an identical drama unfolds both within the conscious mind and upon the cerebral folds of the brain. Yet had Fielding (in some possible world) more closely adhered to the strict scientific understanding of the animal spirits during this time, this shift in perspective would have appeared more jarring. In this case, a glimpse into Dellwyn’s skull would have revealed only the blind, senseless movements of particles rushing through the nervous system—not the more meaningful spectacle of sensitive creatures that, like all thinking things, require periodic diversions in order to remain cognitively well adjusted.
What are we to make of such passages? For one thing, they demonstrate that the animal spirits—despite their purported death—are at least lively enough to make their way into the novels of the mid-eighteenth century. Likewise, we can see that the spirits, in addition to persisting as theoretical neuroscientific entities, also serve as narrative or formal devices, ones that seem to give us a glimpse into both the brain and mind. In other words, when Sterne began to write Tristram Shandy the animal spirits were at the heart of a series of scientific, historical, and even formal and novelistic controversies. A number of physiologists had argued that the animal spirits had no empirical support and were—if they were anything—simply misrecognized metaphors. While still another set of physicians contended that the animal spirits’ supposed replacement (vibrating strings) were just as empirically groundless and that the animal spirits had more experimental confirmation than we might imagine. In short, the animal spirits, despite sustained attacks on their very being, persist in the mid-eighteenth century when Sterne is writing, and, most surprising of all, they persist in some of the novels of the period as narrative technologies that allow access to a character’s (mental and physical) interiority.
And like other narrative devices of the period, the animal spirits are made strange by Tristram Shandy.43 We can appreciate Sterne’s efforts at defamiliarization in a passage that reads as a pitch-perfect parody of the novels I’ve quoted above. While Mrs. Shandy labors upstairs, Walter and Toby sit idly by a fire and speculate. They consider—or rather Walter expounds upon—a tricky problem in philosophy of mind which, typically, tilts toward a neuroscientific explanation: the brothers wonder “by what mechanisms and mensurations in the brain it came to pass, that the rapid succession of their ideas, and the eternal scampering of their discourse from one thing to another . . . had lengthened out so short a period of time” (TS 222). The mind, Walter explains with reference to Locke, contains a “regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train just like . . . the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle” (TS 225). But Toby insists (and Walter later will begin to agree) that the mind behaves more like a “smoak-jack,” a figure that replaces Locke’s image of order and light with one that connotes internal mental confusion as well as external opacity: “the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter!” (TS 225). The brothers eventually fall asleep, though not before Walter’s mind is momentarily excited by Toby’s claim that a “smoak-jack” rather than a lantern is the ideal image for describing the psyche. First, Walter’s drift into sleep is told from the side of the mental—that is, from the subjective (though freely indirect) point of view: “[My father] could not get my uncle Toby’s smoak-jack out of his head,—piqued as he was at first with it;—there was something in the comparison at the bottom, which hit his fancy; for which purpose resting his elbow upon the table, and reclining the right side of his head upon the palm of his hand—but looking first steadfastly in the fire—he began to commune with himself and philosophize about it” (TS 226). Then the scene continues from the side of matter—that is, from an objective point of view that gazes directly upon the mechanisms of Walter’s body and brain. The above-quoted sentence resumes like so: “but his spirits being wore out with the fatigues of investigating new tracts, and the constant exertion of his faculties upon that variety of subjects which had taken their turn in the discourse—the idea of the smoak-jack soon turned all his ideas upside down—so that he fell asleep almost before he knew what he was about” (TS 226). The scene begins by carefully delineating the activities of Walter’s mind: his fixation on Toby’s metaphor and his efforts to reflect further upon it. However, after spending a few moments sketching Walter’s posture—his head propped upon his hand—the novel’s point of view suddenly shifts to the nervous system, and we learn of the animal spirits navigating the pathways of Mr. Shandy’s brain.
Although such shifts are admittedly subtle, Sterne wants us to notice them, and notice them as odd, incongruous, and impossible. For instance, the scene draws a stark contrast between the novel’s content (the topic of Walter and Toby’s speculations) and its form (a depiction of the characters’ mind and body). While Walter frets purposelessly about the brain’s ability to produce a phenomenal feeling (the subjective sense that time is passing slowly or quickly), Tristram, somehow, can see how that organ creates Walter’s precise thoughts in this instance. At the very moment the narrative affords Tristram the ability to stare into his father’s skull and make sense of the neural machinery hidden away there, Walter, the novel’s persistent voice of neuroscientific speculation, seems prepared to accept his brother Toby’s unknowingly skeptical vision of the mind as a “smoak-jack”: a machine that occludes its internal mechanisms beneath clouds of smoke and swaths of soot. As a narrator, then, Tristram appears to possess perceptive powers his father lacks.44 And it may be unclear, for a moment, how to read this juxtaposition: Is the power of Tristram’s narration meant to mock Walter’s brief flirtation with uncertainty, or is the metaphor meant to undercut Tristram’s brain-reading abilities? Ultimately, though, I want to argue that the novel sides with the skeptical and that it seeks to expose Tristram’s view of the brain and mind as a narrative trick made possible only by a bit of outmoded medical terminology. That is to say, in this passage, the novel wants us to notice how personifying the animal spirits makes such glimpses into the brain possible in the first place. Tristram’s account of his father’s speculations can flit effortlessly, almost invisibly, between elements of the conscious mind (imagination, fancy, contemplation, uncertainty) and the brain (the animal spirits) because Tristram, like the neurologists who have preceded him, has personified the animal spirits, turning them into tiny reflections of Walter. Thanks to such figures, Tristram’s two views track parallel actions. Walter explores the nature of mind, and the spirits, tiny natural philosophers themselves, investigate new “tracts” in the brain. Hence, Tristram can look into a brain and witness an internal drama unfolding there because of the animal spirits; moreover, this internal drama can be meaningful (that is, essentially like our own human dramas) because the animal spirits are treated as tiny persons in turn. Of course, had Tristram looked at his father’s or Toby’s real brain, it would appear every bit as opaque as the smokejack.
As I have argued, Sterne was certainly aware that, over the course of his major writing career, the scientific view of the nervous system had altered fundamentally. When the first volumes of Tristram Shandy began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century, the older, animal-spirits physiology that had sustained neuroscience for centuries if not millennia had reached a state of crisis—though it had not been displaced entirely. I’ve contended that Tristram Shandy itself reflects on this crisis, effectively making many of the same critiques of the animal spirits and their figurative basis as the more skeptical physiologists of the time. But as we have also seen, many of these skeptical physiologists tore down previous neuroscientific systems in order to build up their own. More specifically, they maintained that, rather than animal spirits or some other invisible fluid running through the hollow nerves, various acts of sense and thought were actuated by an entirely different bodily mechanism. Borrowing an idea in part from Newton, these thinkers argued that the nerves conveyed information by vibrating like musical strings, communicating through the effects of an invisible ether, or even sharing an inherent “sympathy.” And while it would be too simplistic to say that by the later half of the eighteenth century vibrating nerves had completely surmounted animal spirits, it is certainly the case that this once obscure system had gained tremendously in popularity by then.
This change, too, is indexed in Sterne’s writing. In the later volumes of Tristram Shandy, and especially in Sterne’s last novel, A Sentimental Journey, the animal spirits, although occasionally mentioned, no longer seem a particular point of concern. Instead, this later writing, like neuroscience more generally, is now obsessed with nerves that vibrate in sympathy with one another. This transformation parallels, in turn, a seemingly new emphasis in Sterne’s novels, as they move from the earlier, more learned satires, to the later, more presumably heartfelt sentimental works.45 Indeed, whenever a character’s nervous system vibrates in Sterne’s work, it is almost always doing so because it has been touched with sympathy at another’s plight or triumph. Once Yorick visits Maria at the climax of A Sentimental Journey, he is able to relive and later relieve her sorrows by sharing tears and stories of lost loves. And, sure enough, this act of kindness involves playing upon her vibrating heartstrings: “I touch’d upon the string on which hung all her sorrows—she look’d with wistful disorder for some time in my face; and then, without saying any thing, took her pipe, and play’d her service to the Virgin—The string I touch’d ceased to vibrate—in a moment or two Maria returned to herself—let her pipe fall—and rose up” (SJ 153).
How are we to understand this shift in Sterne’s depiction of the nervous system? There is no simple answer to this question, since Sterne’s approach to this new, vitalist view of the brain and sensorium reveals a calculated ambivalence. On the one hand, Sterne, I’ll argue, hardly embraced this new turn in neuroscience wholeheartedly. For example, his sometimes mocking accounts of Yorick’s ecstatic panegyrics on pulsing nerves and arteries reveal a suspicion of the new nervous paradigm every bit as intense as his skepticism of the old one.46 Indeed, what looked like progress to the neuroscientists of the time often looked like repetition (with some differences) to Sterne. As we have seen, for Sterne, representations of the nervous system are always mediated by metaphor, and the same holds true for these new vitalist systems. If anything changes, for Sterne, amid the transition from spirits to vibrations, it is the complexity of the figures involved, with the new paradigm figuring not only the human nervous system as a little world populated by thinking things but, by following one more twist in the trope, also likening the entire world to a giant brain or nervous system. On the other hand, Sterne hardly distanced himself absolutely from the new nervous system. In fact, he arguably welcomed a view of the brain and nerves more in accord with the sympathetic and sentimental aspects of the human psyche. Vitalism embraced and explained the social aspects of thought and feeling that were neglected by the earlier paradigm’s insistence on plunging into the endless interior of a single brain.47 In this respect, vitalism made real progress on its predecessors—although, for Sterne, that progress is marked by its new figures of mind and brain.
Before diving into Sterne’s complex reaction to this new paradigm, it is important to say a few words about its more general claims. The turn to vibrating nerves, evident especially in the mid- to late eighteenth century, is wrapped up in a wider shift in the sciences of physiology and biology during this time. Much of this shift is outside the ambit of this book, since it concerns broader questions about the difference between living and nonliving things, about the capacity of those same living things to self-organize, and about life’s power to generate new bodies from unassuming seeds and eggs.48 Nevertheless, the same insight fueling new theories in biology also impacted neuroscience: namely, that mechanism alone could not account for the evident abilities of various life-forms. Instead, to explicate such abilities, the natural philosopher would need to devise a new mode of explanation, one that drew on a force or energy inherent to life itself rather than on the sort of dynamics that could perhaps clarify the ticking of a watch but not procreation.49 We’ve already gotten a glimpse of this sort of explanation at work in neuroscience. Consider, again, Cheyne’s insistence that the nerves, suffused with Newtonian “aether,” behave like strings in a musical instrument. While Cheyne certainly likens the nervous system to a musical “machine” in this instance, he does so in order to draw a contrast between his physiology, powered by refined forces, and the older animal-spirits paradigm, which sought to explicate the workings of bodily organs through simpler causal interactions (i.e., one animal spirit knocking into another).
To be fair, animal-spirits physiology was perhaps never as coldly mechanical as its rivals made it out to be, as Willis’s continual references to heat, light, and motion suggest. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, this shift from mechanics to vital forces profoundly changed how one conceived the nervous system and with it the mind. Consider a few of its most significant modifications, all of which were clearly important to Sterne.50 First and foremost, as Peter Hans Reill points out, in the vitalist view of things, the distributed organs of the nervous system operate through “action at a distance”; that is, nerves can affect one another, and be affected in turn, without directly touching or interacting.51 If the nervous system works via vibrations suffusing its flesh, then it follows that those vibrations are not properly localized or entrapped in certain places. As David Hartley explains, because vibrations are energy they tend to propagate across media: “So that if we suppose Vibrations apt to run freely along this Body from its Uniformity, they must pervade the Whole, in whatever Part they are first excited, from its Continuity.”52 A few decades later, Robert Whytt underlines the consequence of this view. An inherent force, which Whytt calls “sympathy,” binds together the body’s organs—even those separated spatially: “We observe a remarkable sympathy between many parts, whose nerves have certainly not the smallest communication with one another.”53 Whytt defends this striking claim by pointing to the ways that dispersed organs can affect one another. For instance, the connection between stomach and brain means that digestive maladies can turn into mental diseases. As Whytt explains, “Nor will it appear strange, that so many and such different symptoms should proceed from a disorder in the stomach and bowels only, if we attend to that sympathy which I have so often mentioned, as taking place between them and the other parts of the body.”54
A second important modification follows from the first: the microcosm’s politics changes and, with it, the very nature of what constitutes thought, sensation, and will. As we have seen, in the older, mechanistic nervous system, the brain serves as a command post in the body. By controlling the flow of animal spirits through nervous pathways, the brain receives information from the body’s peripheries and acts upon it. The vitalist nervous system subtly but significantly refigures this model. For instance, in Whytt’s writing, while the brain remains an important locus of control, the organ no longer needs to actuate every sensation or volition by impelling fluids through the nerves. Since the entire nervous system coheres together as a sympathetic system, and since discrete elements of that system interact or communicate without the direct intervention of a single, sovereign organ, the body’s parts evince a degree of autonomy wholly absent from the earlier model (at least in its most literal formulations). Citing a grisly experiment on a pigeon that not only “live[d] for several hours after being deprived of its brain” but even flew “from one place to another,” Whytt reasons that the “soul or sentient principle” coextensive with the nervous system can operate, at least for a time, “after communication with the brain has been cut off.”55 Nima Bassiri, in an important examination of eighteenth-century vitalism, underlines how this shift in microcosmic politics transforms the very nature of thought. As Bassiri notes, “For Whytt the soul encapsulated the mind’s conscious operations as well as the body’s unconscious vital activities, insofar as it was coextensively diffused along the brain and the nerves in their systematic totality.”56 In other words, by recasting the brain as a node in a sympathetic system rather than as a singular control room in the bodily machine, Whytt’s neuroscience blurs the boundaries usually separating the “conscious” thoughts within the brain from the “unconscious vital activities” happening throughout the body. Taken to its extremes, this new model results in the French vitalist Theophile de Bordeu’s famous image of an acephalous, beehive-like nervous system: “I compare the living body, in order to properly grasp the particular action of each part, to a swarm of bees which cluster together, and hang from a tree like a bunch of grapes. . . . Each part is, so to speak, not quite an animal, but a kind of independent machine which contributes in its way to the general life of the body.”57 In addition to making Swift’s parody into a reality, Bordeu’s metaphor demonstrates how the vitalist understanding of the body and nervous system moves away from the hierarchical (a mere part, like the brain, can run the show) and toward the multitudinous (parts operate independently of a commander). As in Whytt’s work, though, the result is not anarchy but an emphasis on sympathetic unity or, in Bordeu’s phrase, “harmony”: “The application [of this metaphor] is easy: the organs of the body are connected to one another; they each have their district and their action; the relations between these actions, the resulting harmony, is what constitutes health.”58
But the third modification I want to focus on here is arguably the most important of all (especially for understanding Sterne’s reaction to this new paradigm). Once one grants that the nerves and other bodily organs can communicate across distances in the body, it follows that distinct nervous systems can interact in a similar manner. Whytt was fascinated by the way that hypochondriac passions could carry through a crowd: “We have seen above, that there is a remarkable sympathy, by means of the nerves, between the various parts of the body; and now it appears that there is a still more wonderful sympathy between the nervous systems of different persons, whence various motions and morbid symptoms are often transferred from one to another, without any corporeal contact or infection.”59 Importantly, Whytt is not claiming that one nervous system impacts another through rational means. The hypochondriac does not make an audience cough or itch by citing statistics. Instead, for Whytt, a crowd of hypochondriacs literally feels together. The exchange of “various motions and morbid symptoms” happening at this moment is just as physical, unconscious, and autonomic as those that take place within the body itself. As he stresses, the same sympathetic energy binding together the nervous systems of distinct persons also connects the parts within those particular nervous systems.60 It follows that the line between one nervous system and the next begins to blur. As with Newton, speculations about the nature of an all-encompassing vibrating ether naturally lead to thoughts of the whole world as a kind of giant brain. For example, in Diderot’s dialogue D’Alembert’s Dream, one character, having granted the vitalist view of the nervous system, soon reasons that the world is networked with nervous fibers:61 “If the lightest blow is struck at the end of a long beam, I hear that blow, if I have my ear placed to the other end. . . . Why, since everything is connected, contiguous, so that this beam exists in reality, do I not hear what is happening in the vast space that surrounds me, especially if I listen attentively? . . . [Has not this world] also got its ‘meninges,’ that there is not, dwelling in some corner of space, a large or a small spider whose threads reach out to everything?”62 This concluding point is perhaps the most important. Whereas the animal-spirits paradigm obsessively details the inner workings of a single nervous system, the new vitalist paradigm tends to concern itself with the interactions between distinct nervous systems. And at its most expansive, it will claim that all particular nervous systems are parts of the same organism, that the world itself is a brain.
The new vitalist understanding of the nervous system, then, improves on the older, mechanistic paradigm by doing away with the phantasm of the animal spirits and by replacing those entities with lively, sympathetic nerves. Instead of particle-like spirits knocking against one another to produce a chain of action and reaction, the organs of the nervous system can evince sympathy without touching directly. Instead of the brain guiding the corporeal machine, body parts can operate independently of one another—and even think and feel without sending stimuli to a Cartesian theater for further processing. And instead of stressing the borders separating every nervous system from the rest of the world, the new paradigm makes a point of emphasizing connection. Indeed, at its most radical, it argues that all particular nervous systems belong to a more general one. Nevertheless, as we have seen and as Sterne shows, the older, mechanistic, animal-spirits-fueled model was sustained not simply by scientific argument but by figurative language. Like other mid-eighteenth-century readers of neuroscience, Sterne found in animal spirits not the matter that made the mind work but metaphors mistaken for physiological facts. Did the new paradigm improve on the figurative logic driving neuroscience? Did it manage to move past personification and other figures?
Sterne’s answer is complex. For Sterne, although vitalism had done away with invisible animal spirits, it had not abandoned the tendency to explicate a person’s thoughts and actions by referencing a (usually) hidden internal realm where body parts happen to behave like whole persons—or even perhaps behave like a society of persons. For instance, when Whytt speaks of the “sympathy” between the stomach and brain, he arguably explicates this bodily connection by likening it to the sentimental commerce that more commonly passes between two people.63 Sterne certainly suggests as much in one of his first sentimental set pieces in Tristram Shandy. Here is how Tristram explains the drama transpiring within his own nervous system when he encounters a line from Slawkenbergius’s Tale he can feel but not fully comprehend: “What can he mean by the lambent pupilability of slow, dry chat, five notes below the natural tone—which you know, madam, is little more than a whisper? The moment I pronounced the words, I could perceive an attempt towards a vibration in the strings, about the region of the heart.—The brain made no acknowledgement.—There’s often no good understanding betwixt them.—I felt as if I understood it” (TS 326). At this moment, Tristram populates his body with two centers of intelligence. As the site of vibrating strings so important to the “vitalist” neurophysiological paradigm, the region near Tristram’s heart naturally serves as the seat of all those emotions we sense but cannot quite know.64 Meanwhile, the brain, exemplifying the “mechanist” model, stands as the organ of rational thought, a place where indistinct affects would normally become determinate cognitive content. The passage stages in miniature, then, the mid-eighteenth quarrel between old and new neuroscientific paradigms. More importantly, its subtle personifications account for the temperament of Tristram’s organs and hence his state of mind. In this instance, Tristram explicates his odd experience—that he can sense the meaning of this strange sentence without grasping its intellectual import—by attributing it to a disconnect between heart and brain. But that disconnect is explained in turn not by matter, motion, and chemical reactions but by implicitly casting these body parts as a quarreling couple. Rather than mechanism or even vital force, certain facts of social interaction—the need for recognition (“acknowledgment”) and discursive community (“good understanding”)—become the basis by which we make sense of bodily structures and the experiences they cause.65
But even when the new theory of the nervous system seems to replay some of the old one’s tricks, this fresh, vitalist vision of the brain and body still twists things into new shapes. Significantly, the new nervous system locates a social network in the body. Organs sympathize and squabble with their neighbors. To be sure, older conceptions of the nervous system sometimes uncover fraught social relations in the corporeal polity. Animal spirits might rebel against the sovereign soul in the brain, after all. But these are anomalies. More commonly, mechanistic models of the nerves and brain tend to trade in strong synecdoches: the whole psyche is reflected in its parts; if I am happy, it is because my animal spirits are happy too. As a consequence, older representations of the nervous system, even as they isolate a single organism from the rest of the world, nevertheless depict the body as a place inhabited by a markedly uniform crowd of beings. Conversely, in Tristram’s effort to decipher his affective reaction to the passage from Slawkenbergius, the social interactions joining distinct persons, and all the careful interplay of anxious recognition and sympathetic acknowledgment entailed in such dynamics, are folded into a single self. The significance of this switch is more evident in a scene from Sentimental Journey that subtly rewrites the play of heart and brain in Tristram Shandy. When Yorick loudly celebrates the lucky turn of events that finds him holding the hand of a fellow traveler in Calais, the Lady, who possesses the hand in question, chides him for his commentary: “When the situation is, what we would wish, nothing is so ill-timed as to hint at the circumstances which make it so: you thank Fortune, continued she—you had reason—the heart knew it, and was satisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent notices of it to the brain to reverse the judgment?” (SJ 24). In the Lady’s reading, the scene playing out in Yorick’s body parallels the one transpiring at the same moment between the two travelers.66 The Lady implicitly links herself to the heart, secretly satisfied by the shared connection, even as she transforms Yorick, the “English philosopher” who makes a point of cogitating on the event and thereby puncturing their intimacy, into a representative of his own brain. In vitalism, it’s society all the way down.
Yet, as I have noted, these plunges into the sociable interiors of the person become rarer in Sterne’s later writing. As Sterne begins to take on the new understanding of the nerves, the focus of his attention shifts accordingly. Vitalist physiology, its gaze trained on sympathy, community, and connection, tends to focus on the forces binding together apparently distinct brains.67 And Sterne certainly follows suit. In his later fiction, the nervous system consistently reaches out to others by vibrating in sympathy.68 Yorick’s encounter with Maria—already quoted above—is only one of the more famous examples of this phenomenon. Additionally, we find Toby sympathizing with Obadiah and a horse: “But he wants a shoe, poor creature! Said Obadiah. Poor creature! Said my uncle Toby, vibrating the note back again, like a string in unison” (TS 415). Tristram witnessing his uncle saving a fly: an “action . . . more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation” (TS 131). Or, for that matter, Tristram being carried along both by a carriage and by his recounting of Toby’s amours: “For my uncle Toby’s amours running all the way in my head, they had the same effect upon me as if they had been my own—I was in the most perfect state of bounty and good will; and felt the kindliest harmony vibrating within me, with every oscillation of the chaise alike” (TS 781). Even inanimate objects can partake of sympathetic communication: “The day had been sultry—the evening was delicious—the wine was generous—the Burgundian hill on which it grew was steep—a little tempting bush over the door of a cool cottage at the foot of it, hung vibrating in full harmony with the passions” (TS 609).
Read alongside the plunges into the endless microcosms of Sterne’s earlier writing, such moments must come as something of a relief. Normally, the qualities and actions of the whole person are transferred to the neural mechanisms that make them up. As a result, much of the drama of Sterne’s novels unfolds beneath the skin. But in the preceding passages, at least, the narrative focus is trained on the whole person rather than body parts. We appear, finally, to have escaped the figurative logic that locks these fictions into an interminable accounting of the nervous system and its mechanisms. As in Cavendish’s vitalist refiguring of the brain, the nervous system, in these moments of sympathetic connection, operates more like a tool connecting self with world than a secret space populated by reflections of the self. That is to say, when Tristram vibrates in sympathy with his uncle’s actions, his brain serves as a kind of antenna that allows him to tune into the thoughts and feelings of others. Thanks to the nervous system’s sympathetic powers, cognition and sensation are not processes that happen only within the solitary confines of the cranium but are rather actions undertaken with other people and even with the natural environment (think, again, of the “tempting bush . . . vibrating in full harmony with the passions”).69
But even while it stressed sociability and community, vitalism could discomfit Sterne. Vibrating along with other brains may free one from self-involved concern for the homunculi within a single nervous system, but it also reduces moments of sympathy and sentiment to an autonomic response on the order of a sneeze. In contrast with, say, Adam Smith’s account of sympathy—which involves a knowingly theatrical performance substituting self and other in imaginative play—the vitalist conception of sympathy as a stimulus response binding together organs and people can appear reductive and passive.70 James Rodgers’s important account of Sterne’s response to vitalism stresses this point. As Rodgers notes, Sterne sought, at least in part, to “discredit” this grounding of “social sympathy in physiological language,” since such language threatened to make the force of sympathy utterly “mechanical.”71 And indeed we can see that, on a certain level, vitalism makes organisms just as mechanical as the earlier animal-spirits paradigm. This propensity to turn people into puppets pulled along by vibratory strings follows from the synecdochic logic at the heart of vitalism. For natural philosophers like Whytt, sympathy, understood as a corporeal energy, means that parts and wholes, organs and organisms, are interchangeable. Sympathy is simply the force that binds together bodily organs in a (hopefully) harmonious system. Whether those organs happen to be body parts or whole persons is beside the point. Matters of scale are meaningless when the same system is evident at every level. In this sense, when Toby or Tristram or Maria vibrate with another, they behave like organs within their own bodies (think of Tristram’s heart and brain)—or, more accurately, they behave like organs within a still larger nervous system. That will seem like an especially extravagant claim until we remember how often the vitalist neuroscience that concerns Sterne’s later work alludes to worldwide brains and until we also recognize that A Sentimental Journey itself builds to this conclusion with Yorick’s encomium to the “great Sensorium of the world.”
And what is the sensorium of the world? After his aforementioned encounter with Maria, Yorick launches into one of his most sweeping sentimental raptures. In its midst, he apostrophizes “sensibility”: a power that makes possible his intense feelings and his sympathetic exchanges. Since sensibility joins together distinct beings in an affective vibratory community, Yorick likens this force to an element or energy within the nervous system. Our most powerful emotions and strongest sympathies result from, and are also aspects of, the “great Sensorium of the world.” “—Dear Sensibility!” Yorick exclaims, “source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ’tis thou who lift’st him up to Heaven!—Eternal Fountain of our feelings!—’tis here I trace thee . . .—but that I feel some generous joys and generous cares beyond myself;—all comes from thee, great—great Sensorium of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation” (SJ 155).
For modern readers, the passage has proven to be one of Sterne’s most ambiguous. Indeed, most critics read it as both a satirical attack on excessive sentimentality (or irreligious materialism) and a sincere expression of Yorick’s (and, in this interpretation, Sterne’s) love of benevolence and fellow feeling.72 These conflicting interpretations are irresolvable, since the passage itself, purposefully ambivalent, generates both readings. In this sense, Yorick’s apostrophe embodies Sterne’s equivocal reaction to vitalist views of the nervous system more generally. As we will see, the passage is certainly satirical, since it mocks not only indulgent sentiment but also vitalist neuroscience’s tendency to rely on the very figures it has supposedly exposed, obviated, and left behind. However, the passage is also sincere, since it celebrates vitalism’s ability to bring the mind out into the open, to explore the manner in which we think and feel with others.
Yorick’s admittedly odd image of the world as a brain is hardly unique to A Sentimental Journey, as we have seen. Vitalism, with its insistence on finding sympathy at work in the interactions between organs and people, seems to generate such images naturally. Sympathy could connect the corporeal parts within persons or it could connect the parts of the world (which happen to be whole persons). Hence, the period witnesses Diderot’s striking claim that the world has “also got its ‘meninges’” as well as Whytt’s insistence that the nerves of hypochondriacs can convey symptoms across distances. In both accounts, vitalist conceptions of bodily mechanisms make it possible for the nervous system to extend outward and everywhere. Indeed, just a year after the publication of A Sentimental Journey, world-brain imagery reaches its zenith in one of the oddest it-narratives of the period: Tobias Smollett’s History and Adventures of an Atom. The atomic narrator of the novel insists that it is only a single representative of a vast sea of thinking atoms. By its logic, since the entire world is made of atoms, the world must be thinking. But while Sterne’s passage may subtly reference (or perhaps anticipate) some of these near-contemporary works, its allusions also reach farther back in time to an earlier series of texts: Newton’s infamous claim that space might serve as God’s “sensorium,” the resulting Leibniz-Clarke debate concerning the idea’s intelligibility, and the query’s subsequent popularization in Addison’s Spectator papers.73 While Sterne’s contemporary critics readily trace Yorick’s apostrophe to this debate, they often neglect a key aspect of the source material: namely, that it turns on figurative language. If Sterne had Newton’s query in mind when he wrote about the “great sensorium of the world,” then he is thinking not only about God, world, brain, science, and sensibility but also about metaphor.
To appreciate what Sterne might have made of all this, it’s worth briefly rehearsing the debate Newton commences. Newton wonders if “infinite Space” serves as God’s “Sensory” or sensorium.74 Leibniz worries that the claim would make God reliant on physical organs and thereby threaten his transcendence. Clarke insists that Leibniz has taken a metaphor for a literal statement. According to Clarke, to make God’s perception of the world “more intelligible,” Newton “illustrates it by a similitude”: God sees objects in space just as the thinking thing within us sees ideas in the brain’s sensorium (here understood as something like the Cartesian theater).75 But Leibniz isn’t so sure that the “similitude” really does make things “more intelligible.” In his subsequent exchanges with Clarke, Leibniz presses his interlocutor on the precise meaning and function of the “sensorium,” thereby demonstrating how the brain can prove to be an unsteady vehicle in a metaphor.
In taking up this network of texts, A Sentimental Journey transforms some of their concerns. Unlike Newton or Clarke, Yorick isn’t primarily interested in explicating God’s ability to witness objects in space. Instead, he wants to account for the nature of “sensibility.” Nevertheless, the figurative logic at play in the original debate is still alive in Sterne’s passage. Read through its allusions, Yorick’s apostrophe, like Newton’s and Clarke’s texts before it, employs a metaphor whose vehicle (the brain) seeks to make intelligible a tenor (sensibility). More concretely, Yorick explicates sensibility by likening its vibrations to the nervous system’s energies. But in this respect, the passage also restages the questions that Leibniz implicitly asks of Clarke: Do such metaphors actually clarify anything, or are we simply comparing one mysterious entity to another? After all, if the sentimental feelings joining Yorick to others are like the energies flowing through the brain, then what is the nature of that nervous energy? And once Sterne’s writing entertains this latter question, we are back to metaphor, since, as Tristram Shandy demonstrates in its stories of bodily organs seeking “acknowledgment” and “good understanding,” the eighteenth century often explained the nervous system by likening it to a society of sentimental subjects. In other words, in this apostrophe to the “great sensorium,” Sterne’s novel uses the nervous system as a means of explaining “sensibility,” sociability, and community, while elsewhere his writing will draw upon social interactions to explain the interplay of cerebral organs. We seem to be going in circles.
Tracing Sentimental Journey’s depiction of the “great sensorium” to its source in Newton, Leibniz, and Clarke, then, can make its satire appear more pointed. While Sterne is certainly caricaturing excessive sentiment, he is also mocking Yorick’s efforts to use the nervous system as an explanatory principle, since doing so finds the parson trading in tropes that quickly turn on him. The effects of sympathy are explained by nervous energy, but this vibratory energy is just sympathy joining together bodily organs in a harmonious whole. More generally, the passage demonstrates how vitalist neuroscience, far from leaving behind the figurative logic of the preceding paradigm, simply flips its metaphors on their head. In mechanistic neuroscience, the workings of the nervous system are explained by comparing parts of the brain to the whole person. In vitalism, sympathy and sentiment are explained by comparing these interpersonal forces to energies within a nervous system. It can seem as if, in the transition from mechanism to vitalism, an entirely different question is being asked and an entirely different kind of explanation has swept in, with the brain moving from mysterious tenor to illuminating vehicle in the process. But in fact, as Sterne suggests, both paradigms narrate the same dynamic. Brains are just organs filled with persons (actual persons or animal spirits), while persons are just elements within a brain (that could belong to a particular person or perhaps the whole world).
Still, it would be a mistake to assume that Yorick’s apostrophe to the “great sensorium” should be read as pure parody (of sentimentality or of vitalist neuroscience). Critics who have discerned something sincere in the apostrophe are not so far off the mark, though even here paying attention to its subtle figurative logic is helpful. As we have seen, Sterne welcomed vitalist neuroscience’s interest in the forces that joined persons together in sympathetic union. Vitalism’s sense that thinking and feeling were actions undertaken in concert with others rather than neural processes unfolding behind the hard casing of the cranium freed subjects from their walled-off solitude. At its most far-reaching, vitalism challenged identity itself by breaching the borders between self and other. However, vitalism’s tendency to explain sympathetic persons by likening them to elements within the nervous system seemed to lead to a senseless metaphor or (worse still) appeared to cast these same persons as senseless thralls themselves. How then could one retain vitalism’s most promising insights without succumbing to its mistakes? How could we have social minds without turning ourselves into person-sized animal spirits in a world-brain? One solution, of course, is to simply abandon the idea of sympathy as nervous energy and instead embrace other, less physiological accounts of the force. Instead, Yorick’s apostrophe moves in a different direction: it refigures the metaphorical logic at the heart of vitalist neuroscience, thereby transforming both persons and their brains.
So far I have read Yorick’s claim that sensibility is the “great Sensorium of the world” as a figure that works—or ought to work—by comparing an unknown tenor (sensibility) to a known vehicle (the sensorium in the nervous system). This reading is suggested both by the Newton-Clarke-Leibniz debate, which serves as one of Sterne’s sources, and by similar claims evident in contemporary neuroscience, which Sterne appears to have absorbed. But one could read the metaphor differently, with both elements (sensibility and sensorium) playing off one another and exchanging properties. In other words, while the nervous system explains sympathetic communion, those sympathetic interactions might also change how we conceive the nervous system. We might note the passage’s odd use of “sensorium.” Again, Sterne seems to have used the word to hint at the Newton-Clarke-Leibniz debate. And in that series of texts, the “sensorium” (or sometimes “sensory”) behaves as a Cartesian theater: it is the organ within the brain where sensory stimuli are brought before a thinking substance. In this understanding of the term, the “sensorium” is preeminently a place in the brain—usually a place somewhere at its center. But where is the “great Sensorium of the world” placed? Where can we find it? When a hair hits the ground in “the remotest desert,” and the world’s sensorium “vibrates” in response, are we to imagine that the subtle sound of the hair somehow makes its way to a sensibility secreted away somewhere specific? Clearly not, since by accommodating sympathetic interaction the nervous system itself has changed. To behave as a stand-in for sensibility, the sensorium cannot be a single, central organ (a Cartesian theater); instead, it must extend across the world. As a result, center and periphery, borders and hierarchies seem to dissolve in this vision of the nervous system.
We might take all this to be another indication that Sterne is poking fun at the illogic produced by nervous figures. However, the idea is taken seriously enough that this new image of the world-brain is soon applied to particular nervous systems in the novel. For example, just after apostrophizing sensibility, Yorick, seemingly carried away by his encomium, conveys a series of sentimental set pieces that depict various characters crossing the boundaries of their selves: “—Touch’d with thee [sensibility], Eugenius draws my curtain when I languish—hears my tale of symptoms, and blames the weather for the disorder of his nerves. Thou giv’st a portion of it sometimes to the roughest peasant who traverses the bleakest mountains;—he finds the lacerated lamb of another’s flock.—This moment I behold him leaning with his head against his crook, with piteous inclination looking down upon it!—Oh! had I come one moment sooner! it bleeds to death!—his gentle heart bleeds with it” (SJ 155). The passage blurs together various beings and viewpoints. Not only do characters cross literal borders (Eugenius reaching across the curtain of Yorick’s bed, the peasant marching across the mountains); they also seem to share sentiments and even states of mind, as if their nervous systems were woven together. For example, Yorick suffers supine, but it is Eugenius’s nerves that are “disorder[ed]” (Eugenius “blames the weather,” but certainly one implication is that Yorick’s “tale of symptoms” has hypochondriacally or sympathetically affected Eugenius). Similarly, when the peasant looks down “with piteous inclination” on the fallen lamb, Yorick, as if standing just behind the spectacle, witnesses the encounter with a great deal of sentimental attachment (“This moment I behold him leaning with his head against his crook”). But Yorick and the peasant become still closer when, in the next moment—and with one of Sterne’s characteristic dashes—a voice, or perhaps voices, breaks in to comment upon the scene: “Oh! had I come one moment sooner! it bleeds to death!—his gentle heart bleeds with it.—” It’s manifestly unclear who speaks here. Either Yorick ventriloquizes the peasant’s lament or, what perhaps amounts to the same thing, he has inhabited completely the peasant’s point of view, effectively making them a single psyche. If we ever wanted to know what a novel, written by a nervous system without a single “sensorium,” and so without a commanding center or Cartesian theater, might read like, then we certainly have an example in this passage.